


you can't carry it with you if you want to survive

by cipherwriter



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Guilt, M/M, feelings talks, for once jon says how he feels without immediate threat of death, post-episode 170, this is mostly fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-18
Updated: 2020-06-18
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:06:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24785890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cipherwriter/pseuds/cipherwriter
Summary: Jon knows how to sew, which he knew would come in handy out here in the apocalypse. If only every mistake was so easily fixed.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims, jonathan sims & his grandmother
Comments: 10
Kudos: 111





	you can't carry it with you if you want to survive

Martin hadn’t been entirely present for a while.

He and Jon were walking again. They hadn’t stopped after that awful house, which perhaps had not been the best idea, but Jon had just wanted to put as much distance between it and them as possible. Still though, as they walked further and further away, Martin seemed to fade in and out. He wasn’t part of the Lonely anymore, no, but getting lost in its domain had still seemed to affect him pretty deeply, even from far away. Jon had been trying to talk to him and had kept a tight grip on his hand, but Martin only responded about half the time.

Jon had been growing worried. He couldn’t stop looking at Martin’s white hair and grey eyes, remembering when they had both been a deep and lively brown. Martin had already escaped the Lonely once, but it had left a permanent mark on him. Had Jon been foolish to actually believe Martin could do it again and come out mark free?

“Oh, drat,” Martin said, at last, and Jon’s head whipped over to him quick enough that had he still been fully human he certainly would have hurt his neck. Martin was looking down at his shoulder, his expression a bit pinched in.

“What? What is it, what’s wrong?” Jon asked, drawing close to Martin and scanning over his arm, his shoulder, everywhere. Did something happen to him? Was he hurt?

Martin took both of Jon’s desperately roving hands into his own. Jon looked up at him, still panicked. 

“I’m okay, Jon,” Martin said, but Jon had gone back to looking over him everywhere, searching for what was wrong. Could he have gotten injured in the Lonely? Jon hadn’t noticed anything that could have hurt him, but he hadn’t been with Martin the whole time, had he? No, he’d lost him, let him get left behind (almost forever), and anything could have happened to him in the time it had taken Jon to find him. 

“Hey, hey, Jon.” And then one of Martin’s hands was on Jon’s face and was tilting it up so Jon was looking him in the face. He looked- he looked fine. He didn’t seem to be in pain; in fact, he was smiling a bit. That was more expression than Jon had seen on him since first finding him in the Lonely’s domain.

Jon let out a breath of relief and leaned his face into Martin’s hand. He was okay. They were okay. Martin was back.

“Are you alright, Jon?” Martin asked softly.

“Yes, yes, I’m fine,” Jon answered, then looked up to see Martin making a half disbelieving and half disapproving face. Jon cringed slightly. Right. Emotional openness. “Fine, okay. I was- am- worried about you. You just… you’ve been distant since we went through the Lonely, and now you finally spoke up on your own for the first time just to say ‘drat,’ so I got concerned. I- I was worried that I’d lost you for a while there. Back in the house and now, as we were walking, you just seemed so… distant.”

Without any words, Martin leaned down to kiss Jon, and Jon leaned into it with much more hunger than Martin’s initial soft peck. His hand held the back of Martin’s neck tight, reassuring himself of his presence, warm and constant. 

“I’m here, Jon. I’m not leaving, and you won’t lose me,” Martin said once they broke out of the kiss, and Jon rested his head against Martin’s chest and nodded. 

They stood like that for a little while, until Martin chuckled. 

“What’s so funny?” Jon asked, still pressed into Martin.

“Well, not ruin the moment, but the whole reason this started is since my sleeve is torn,” Martin answered with a smile still clear in his voice.

Jon felt his face heat up. Ah, yes. Martin’s sleeve had probably ripped as they’d left the Lonely’s domain. Jon had been rather desperate to leave and may have, in the process, ripped Martin’s coat sleeve as he tugged him out. This whole reaction was rather embarrassing now. 

Jon cleared his throat and pushed back from Martin, still not quite willing to look him in the face. “If you’d like, I can fix that.”

“You can?” Martin asked.

“Of course I can, I wouldn’t offer if I couldn’t,” Jon said and slipped his bag off his shoulder. “We should stop for a bit anyway. Give ourselves a bit of a rest before diving headfirst into another domain.”

“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right.” Martin sat down, cross legged on the ground, and pulled off his coat, handing it over to Jon. Jon turned it over in his hands until he found the tear. Then he turned it inside out and pulled his little sewing kit from his bag.

“You brought a sewing kit,” Martin said, somewhat incredulously.

“Yes, I did. It’s very practical to have, as demonstrated by our current need for it,” Jon said. Really, he didn’t quite understand Martin’s shock over all this.

“Well, it’s just- I mean- you’ve never exactly struck me as the sewing type, Jon,” Martin said and watched as Jon threaded the needle, his tongue poking out of his mouth a bit.

“I didn’t realize there was a sewing type. It’s not as though it’s hard to mend a hole,” Jon said. He cut the thread and began weaving the needle in and out of the fabric he’d pinched together in his hands.

“No, I suppose it’s not.” 

The two of them sat in silence for a moment, until Jon sighed.

“My grandmother taught me,” he said. “To sew, that is. She was rather good at it, so I am as well.” It felt like a confession. It was just the facts of it, but, well… 

“Things weren’t always great between her and I. I was a devil of a kid and she was a bit too old and unprepared to take care of another child of any type.” Jon chuckled a bit. “But she did her best. And we had our moments. I always wanted to learn more, didn’t really matter what about, and so when I saw her patching up a hole that I had made in my jeans falling from a tree, I asked her to teach me.”

Martin had shifted, so he was now sitting with his legs curled up to his chest and his head resting on his knees as he listened to Jon. 

“I was dreadful at it at first. Awkward with my hands. But I got better, and then she started teaching me more advanced stitches as well. I think she was actually proud of me for how well I took to it, which, well, that was a rare thing from her. A couple times, I even taught her a new stitch after reading a book about sewing. We would listen to her old records and sew together in the early mornings, or in the evenings after dinner. Just the two of us, sometimes talking, sometimes not, mending holes or hemming sleeves or even embroidering, though I’d never been quite as fond of that.” Jon was just about finished with mending the hole, but he kept pushing the needle through, hardly even aware of what he was doing. “She’d make us tea, and we’d eat biscuits. Sometimes, instead of listening to music, we’d watch a movie together. I wasn’t too keen on movies, but it was nice to have time with her. It was a rare thing.”

“That sounds like a nice memory,” Martin said. He was looking at Jon with this little smile on his face, part fondness and part sadness. Jon was sure there was a similar look on his face.

“It is. It’s one of few, when it comes to her, but it was nice. She had a rule, with dunking biscuits. You had to dunk it for two and a half seconds exactly. At that point, it would be soft, but not quite soft enough to break off into the tea.” Jon huffed out a laugh. “God, I don’t know when I last thought about that.”

“What, have you been breaking the rule all these years?” Martin asked, teasingly scandalized.

“I think at some point I stopped dunking biscuits in my tea. Probably around the time I got promoted to Head Archivist. I had an image to uphold, after all,” Jon answered. It was meant as a joke, but it came out angry, his frustration with his past self seeping into his words.

There was a moment of silence. Jon had stopped sewing. All of this, everything in his life, down to even just the smallest detail, had been ruined by his own pride and his work at the Institute. There had hardly been anything good enough to ruin as it was, and now what little he’d had had been taken from him or tainted.

“Well, then, I guess when all this is over we’ll just have to get some biscuits and some tea,” Martin said, and Jon looked back up at him and shook himself out of his own self pity. No, not everything was ruined by the Institute. Without it, he would never have met Martin, and of all the good things that had happened in his life, Martin may have been the most good thing. 

“Yeah, we will,” Jon replied with a little smile. They both knew it wasn’t going to happen, that there was nothing after this for them. But the hope couldn’t hurt them. 

“You know it’s not all your fault, right?” Martin asked after another beat. 

Jon looked down at the needle in his hand and slowly began to tie it off. “You’ll have to be more specific than that. There are certainly some things that are my fault. The hole in your coat, for example.”

“The apocalypse. Becoming the Archivist,” Martin said. “Losing me in the Lonely.”

Jon bunched the fabric in his hands as they curled into fists. “What if I hadn’t found you?”

“Then it still wouldn’t have been your fault,” Martin answered simply. “Look, just because something bad happens with you around, it doesn’t mean you’re the one to blame. If anything, you’re what saved me from that place, not what made me get lost. That was just, well… that was just because of who I am.”

“But it wouldn’t have happened at all if we weren’t in this place,” Jon snapped.

“Which also isn’t your fault,” Martin said.

“How, Martin? How is that not my fault?” Jon cried, looking up at Martin again at last. “Everything I’ve done led to this, and if I’d just been smarter or less selfish or- or if someone had just killed me ages ago then none of this would have happened. It’s all. My. Fault.”

“No, it’s not,” Martin said firmly. “Maybe if you were dead it wouldn’t have happened right now, sure, fine, okay, but Jonah still would have just found another person to manipulate. Which is what happened to you, by the way. You were manipulated.”

“I can’t just be absolved of the blame for all the things I did, the people I hurt. The Statements I took from people off the streets, relishing in their fears…” Jon felt nauseated, sick with himself.

“But you stopped.”

“Not because I wanted to! Because, because people were disappointed in me!” Jon protested, digging his hands into his hair and pulling at his scalp. “You’re making it sound so simple, but it’s not! I did this, in some way or another, I did this!” Jon waved his arms at the world in general to emphasize which “this” he meant.

“Fine, maybe I am oversimplifying it, but so are you,” Martin shot back. “Maybe- maybe some things are your fault, but you know what, some of them aren’t! Most of them, in fact! And I’ll bet you that some of them are my fault too!” 

Jon made a groan of frustration and was about to argue… something back (what exactly he wasn’t quite sure) when Martin cut him off.

“No, Jon, don’t argue, just listen, because frankly, I can’t stand this- this martyr complex you’ve got going on right now. Not everything that has gone wrong is your fault, and- and quite honestly it’s… egotistical to believe it could be. You, individually, could not cause the end of the world as we know it on accident.” Martin was waving his arms in emphasis too, now. “And, fine, let’s go back to something that’s pretty undeniably your fault. You’re right, you did rip my coat sleeve. And what did you do when you found out? You fixed it! And that’s what we’re doing now with the world! It doesn’t help to keep blaming yourself for things that may or may not even be your fault when you’re trying to fix them! I just makes you feel bad!”

Jon wanted to argue back, but despite the anger and nausea still churning in him, he didn’t actually have anything to say. It was his fault. All of it. It had to be. If it wasn’t his fault, that meant that all the guilt he’d been carrying with him wasn’t necessary. 

It meant that everything had been out of his control the whole time.

“Jon,” Martin said, his voice softer. Jon looked at him, and Martin was looking at him with such a look of compassion. Jon didn’t deserve it, couldn't stand it, so he looked away again, back at the dust beneath them that was the same as the dust everywhere else (except for the fear domains which were even worse). “Jon, just-” Martin sighed. “You just shouldn’t have to carry all this guilt with you all the time. You’ve already got enough to deal with.”

“I- Thank you, Martin. I don’t- I’m not-” Jon took a deep breath. “It is hard for me to believe you. But I appreciate it.” He looked up and smiled softly at Martin. 

Jon knew that he wouldn’t be able to work through this any time soon, and he doubted that he had much time beyond that. But he also knew Martin wouldn’t stop trying, and even that seemed to lighten his load a bit. 

Jon finally cut the thread and needle off the coat and turned the sleeve back around so it was right side out. Only now, looking at it closely, did he really register what he had actually done; the sleeve was stitched up sturdily and there, right below the shoulder seam, he had embroidered a little red heart. His face flushed, he was sure, but he handed the coat over to Martin anyway.

Martin looked down at it and smiled at Jon. So it was okay. And then they held each other for a little while and that was okay too.

**Author's Note:**

> he mends the sleeve (and the world) with love :)
> 
> anyway this kind of got away from me (every fic does) but i wrote this mainly due to a post i saw earlier today by achivistbot on tumblr and my experiences with my own grandfather who i am missing. about half of what i wrote about jon and his grandmother is stuff i lifted straight from my experiences with my grandfather, but my grandpa was way cooler than her in every conceivable way. the cookies he and i would eat with our tea were social tea cookies and they are so fucking good oh my god


End file.
